NASA's Next Mars Rover, Curiosity, Is an Internet Star

NASA's Curiosity Cam allows the public to watch technicians assemble and test NASA's next Mars rover in a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech

NASA's
next Mars rover is living up to its name. More than 1
million people have logged on to watch the construction of Curiosity,
as the
rover is called, since NASA began broadcasting the work on the Internet.

Curiosity,
a $2.3 billion rover also known as the Mars
Science Laboratory, is being assembled and tested in a clean room at
NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. NASA's "Curiosity Cam"
regularly
shows engineers and technicians clad in head-to-toe white smocks
working on the
rover. [6
Facts About NASA's Curiosity Rover]

More
than a million unique viewers spent a combined 400,000
hours watching the rover-building webcast between Oct. 21 ? when the
webcast
began ? and Nov. 23, NASA officials said. The daily webcast and chats
have
continued since to keep the public up to date on the Curiosity rover's
construction.

The
web camera is mounted in the viewing gallery of the
Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL. While the gallery is already a
regular
stop on JPL's public tour for on-site visitors, NASA's Curiosity Cam
allows
visitors from around the world to see the space agency's engineers at
work.

At
scheduled times, viewers can also interact with each
other and JPL rover staff via Curiosity Cam, according to NASA
officials.

The
Mars Science Laboratory is one of the most technologically
challenging interplanetary rover missions ever designed, NASA officials
have
said. Curiosity is designed to drive longer distances over rougher
terrain than
previous Mars rovers.

The
nuclear-powered rover will investigate whether the region
around its Martian landing site ? the choice of which is still being
finalized
? was ever capable of supporting microbial life, NASA officials said.

Curiosity
will carry a science payload 10 times heavier than
the instruments on NASA's twin Spirit
and Opportunity rovers, which have been tooling around the
Martian surface
since early 2004.

This
SPACE.com
graphic shows the instruments that will be aboard the
car-sized
Curiosity rover,
which is twice as long and four times as heavy
as Spirit or Opportunity.

Months
of assembly and testing still remain before Curiosity
is ready for launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rover and spacecraft
components will be shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida
next
spring. The launch is due to occur between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011,
and
Curiosity is slated to arrive on Mars in August 2012.